


And I Am Even Here

by Doyle



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-14
Updated: 2009-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-02 17:49:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doyle/pseuds/Doyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hex and Martha unknowingly cross paths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And I Am Even Here

"And can you turn your head to one side for me? That's good. Oh, it's bad news, Miss McShane, that whole head'll have to come off, I'm afraid…"

All those reflexes he'd lost when he left the TARDIS came flooding back just in time to let him dodge the kick, laughing, and Hex reminded himself that winding up Ace when she was wearing boots that impressive was a stupid idea. Especially when she was sitting on an examination table and had a really good angle on ensuring there'd be no little Hexes in his future. Try explaining that one to Lise. She'd been good about a strange woman kidnapping her boyfriend every six months or so, but she might draw the line at grievous bodily harm.

Satisfied she'd at least put the fear of God into him, Ace sat back and let him run the scanner over her forehead. "Less of your lip, you. Or else I'll have words with the manager about his nurses' bedside manner."

"Sorry, it's your word against mine, and since the manager's me..." He snapped the scanner back into its casing and stood back, ruffling her hair and getting a slapped wrist for it. "Looks deeper than it is. Two minutes with the dermaspray and it won't even scar, if you can hold still that long."

Ace slouched on the table with an epic sigh. "Two minutes? Have you got any magazines?"

He grinned at her, thinking _I really missed you this time_ but far too conscious of how much piss-taking he'd have to endure to say it out loud. "I'll get the spray. Try not to blow anything up while I'm at the pharmacy."

"Won't be so hard since _somebody_ told hospital security to confiscate my stuff…" floated down the corridor after him.

A&amp;E was packed to the doors with the annual flu epidemic and the sight of his nurses and medics rushing from one sneezing patient to the next made him hurry up in sympathy. Not enough to cut his visit with Ace short, though; it wasn't as if he saw her that much these days. Anyway, his head of nursing had spent five years telling him they could manage without him for a couple of hours without the hospital spontaneously exploding and then sinking into the planet's core, and Hex was grudgingly starting to admit she had a point.

There was someone in front of him at the pharmacy. The chemist on duty was arguing with a woman in a red jacket; well, arguing as much as Hex had ever known him to argue, which meant he was smiling a lot and looking worried. All four of his eyes moistened with relief when he spotted Hex.

"All right, Ferdy?"

Ferdy shuffled to the side of his booth and whispered, loudly enough that the woman could have heard him two wards over. "It's this gentlewoman, boss. She says she needs Tilarin."

Hex looked at her. Younger than him, very pretty, probably human - she looked a bit like Lise, actually. "You look a bit like my girlfriend," seemed a bad opening line, though, so he went for, "Hiya. I'm Hex - um, Nurse Schofield, I'm in charge here - most of the time - you're after Tilarin, then?"

"Martha Jones," she said, looking relieved to be speaking to someone who wasn't threatening to burst into a double set of tears on her. "I'm a medical student… officer… student medical officer. My ship needs this Tilarin stuff. It's an emergency. We've got a planet full of sick people and I don't really understand the situation but apparently this is what we need and this is the only planet anywhere that has it, so…" she trailed off with a shrug of her shoulders. "I think my friend - my captain, I mean - sent me in here expecting me to just nick the stuff and walk out with it under my coat but I thought I'd ask first. Goodwill among the medical community and all that."

A random thought slipped into his head, that he could just see the Doctor sending him and Ace in to distract the medical staff while he slipped in through the back and helped himself to what he needed, set his pawns and his dominoes in motion. Weird thing. He hadn't thought about the Doctor in a couple of years, not properly. "Look, if it's an emergency of course we'll help. Ferdy, you ever heard of this drug?"

"No-o, but…" He pushed forward a scrap of paper - who still had paper in this day and age? - and Hex nodded wisely at the scrawl that covered the page like the death throes of a mad, drunk spider. "That's a Pleitz-Weirman diagram of the chemical structure."

"Course it is, I was just thinking that," he said, straight-faced, and was pleased when Martha Jones grinned at him. "Can you whip us up a batch?"

"But that's the thing." Ferdy blinked, his face ashen. "We've already got some in the lab. We've been working on it for months. We only worked out the right formula this lunchtime, and then she walks in with the formula already written down…"

They didn't have Kleenex this far in the future. Overworked and overemotional pharmacists hadn't been properly planned for. "There, there," Hex said, patting him on the shoulder. "You think that's head-wrecking, you need to hear about some of the stuff I did before I worked here. Come on, take Dr Jones to the lab and sort her out with as much of this as she needs."

"Tilarin." Ferdy shook his head in wonderment, flipping over the sign on the counter and beckoning Jones to follow him. "My daughter's called Tilaris. How did you _know_?"

"You're a lifesaver," she told Hex, and gave him a brilliant smile before she vanished though the research department doors.

**

"Remind me never to come here if I lose a leg," Ace complained. "You'd wander off and leave me bleeding to death. Two minutes, you said. Longest two minutes I've ever had, and that's including when I got lost in the bit of the TARDIS where time doesn't work."

"Sorry, were you saying something? I wasn't listening, I was trying to imagine what you'd look like trying to ride the bike with one leg. There." He ran his finger across the new pink skin that arced across her forehead and down to her temple. "Good as new. Try not to get in the way of any more robots."

"Yeah. Might stay out of France till it's all calmed down a bit. Been having a row with La Pompadour anyway." She tilted her head and looked at him, and on anybody else the combination of big frock and bike leathers would have looked like mental-drag-queen, but on her it just worked. "There's another helmet if you fancy a trip."

"Nah." Had to say it quickly, like pulling off a plaster. "We'd get lost again and Lise'd murder me. And then you, cause you'd be driving. And then me again, just to make sure."

"You like them bossy, don't you?"

"Wonder where I get that from, eh?"

She thumped him, not as hard as she might have done, across the arm. "Come on. You can walk me down to the carpark."

"It's a garden. You just treat it like a carpark."

"Oh, same difference."

**

He'd hidden the TARDIS, for once, so well that she'd walked past the same patch of trees twice without realising it was there. "Doctor?" Martha called, and suddenly he was there, lifting the boxes of medicine out of her arms. "This was all they had."

"It'll be enough. We can synthesise it from this." Even on Yuarin, surrounded by the dead and the dying, he'd been cheerier than this. He looked drained, almost defeated, and for the first time she felt frightened.

"It will work, won't it? We can save them?"

"Oh, yes. Simple cure. Clears up the plague like that. The Yuari'll be up and about in time for tea. If they did tea. One little drug to save a whole world and it only ever exists on this planet." The Doctor shoved his key into the lock, hard.

Days of adrenaline and exhaustion and sudden relief that it was going to be all right piled on top of her all at once, and she wanted to lie on that soft grass and sleep for a couple of hours. No time, though. Even with a time machine. But she lingered outside the doorway for a few more seconds. "It's beautiful," she said, something she found herself saying recently as much as "where are we?" and "what the _hell_ are you on about?"

"One of the most peaceful planets in the galaxy," he said. "Once upon a time. The sort of place you'd want your friends to end up, if they had to leave you." He looked up at the deep blue sky, the elegant white curves of the hospital building sweeping up to meet it. "This is Arcadia." He said it, she thought, the way someone might say 'Hiroshima', and she kept the rest of her questions to herself.

Somewhere on the other side of the trees there was a roar of a motorbike engine, five hundred years out of time, and a woman's laughter, and then silence.

**Author's Note:**

> _I was there at the fall of Arcadia. Someday I might even come to terms with that._ \- the Doctor, _Doomsday_


End file.
